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Tag Archives: greatness

Greatness In Failure

Thursday, 25 April 2013
Musing, Success

The formula is simple.

We err in judgment and must pay our dues.

Sometimes, the reparations start and finish with a real apology. Often however, sorry is just the beginning with ramifications – to career; to reputation; to trustworthiness – far reaching. When the mistake is big, the ramifications will have their own steam and will play out whether an apology is uttered or not.

The act then becomes a choice of consciences and an enterprise of healing. It’s a matter of character – maturity, true remorse, and humility – and therefore saying sorry is acknowledging that these things matter.

You’re going to make mistakes – we all understand that – so it is not your perfection that defines your greatness, it is your response to failure.

MOVE: Foreigner

Wednesday, 17 April 2013
MOVE

When I travel to a place for the first time, I often find myself pondering the question “could I live here?” It’s like my shorthand way to try make sense of a foreign place.

The answer is frequently the same: everywhere other than home seems less liveable once you get pass all the newness. As the gloss wears off you start to realise that many of the novel differences, which at first seem exciting, would actually require quite some adjustment to your life if they were engaged in the everyday. There is then this growing feeling of homesickness and wanting to draw back towards the known  – your own bed, your partner and friends, your favourite places to eat, etc.

When we’re trying to work towards something greater, we’re often presented with this tension between the excitement of a promised land and the comfort of home base. However, in order to some day succeed at that something greater, we will all at some point have to face stepping into the feeling of being out of our zone.

Journeying towards a promised land will rarely, if ever, not feel like that.

Developing the stomach for the exotic often becomes the difference between making it all the way to the end or not. It’s not that we have to give up the ideals of ‘home’ and the warmth and comfort that it brings to life, but to one day find a new home, we must keep going until foreign goes from the unfamiliar to the unnoticed.

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This post is part of series called MOVE. Compiled during April 2013, MOVE poses ideas and tips anyone can employ to shift themselves – and those around them – into action.

MOVE: Whispers Of Greatness

Monday, 8 April 2013
MOVE

“I am the greatest! I said that before I knew I was”
- Muhammad Ali

Have you ever dreamed of whispering – “I am the greatest” – to yourself let alone proclaim it to the world? I know that’s something I’m not comfortable with!

Most of us don’t have the bravado the mercurial Ali had, but nor do we need to. However, thinking ourselves into action is as important and as potent as it was for The Greatest. We don’t need to boast but we do need to believe – especially while our dream is just a dream and before anyone other than ourselves sees it.

Affirming self-talk is the beginning of our personal journey to success. Our opportunity to excel will most likely come out of our own drive to thrive.  Life isn’t going to be like Karate Kid (for most of us) where we have a wise sage guiding our every step. Its not that we’re going to be alone, quite the contrary, but the responsibility for our personal growth is going to fall on us as individuals. We each need to be able to coach ourselves into the right frame of mind.

So are you thinking like the person you want to be?

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This post is part of series called MOVE. Compiled during April 2013, MOVE poses ideas and tips anyone can employ to shift themselves – and those around them – into action.

Psycho

Tuesday, 19 February 2013
Musing, Success

In 1959, after being recognised as one of the greatest filmmakers the time, Alfred Hitchcock had to mortgage his home to fund his next film, Psycho. Fed up of the film conventions as they were, Hitchcock wanted to be more experimental and daring.

Even as one of the most famous and respected directors in Hollywood, Hitchcock’s Psycho was initially shunned by movie studios as it pushed boundaries and social conventions thought to risky for film at the time. We may not think anything of Hitchcock’s techniques used to suggest murder and sex, but at the time they shook good taste sensibilities. So Hitchcock undertook the project at his own risk so his vision could be realised.

Psycho prevailed in the end, both commercially and critically, and is still regarded as one of Hitchcock’s best films.

Even in light of Hitchcock’s “greatness” the fear of the unknown and the untested was more powerful than his credibility at his craft. But for Hitchcock’s own resolve, it’s possible no one would have adapted Psycho into one of the greatest films of all time.

Psycho serves as a reminder that holding back on your groundbreaking ideas until you’ve pleased others enough to be credible isn’t the golden ticket it seems. Whenever your vision requires someone else to take a leap of faith, the best  – and perhaps only way – to get them to come willingly is if you are the first to take it. Moreover, if you’re not prepared to move first and throw your own hat over the fence, then what right do you have to ask it of another?

How To Be Human

Thursday, 14 February 2013
Musing, Success

“In the age of technology, with the ability to simulate and manipulate anything, how do we maintain being human?”
Dave Grohl, Sound City.

Here’s how I think we answer that:

Choosing to stay within our natural limitations (available time, emotional energy, our talent/ skill in the present moment) forces us to concentrate on only the most important things about what we are doing. Perhaps counter intuitively by choosing to stay within certain restraints we actually sharpen ourselves. The main reason for this is that by not having access to everything, we are left to commit to a particular way, thought, idea or belief about the best way to do something.

There’s not returning to redubbed, touched up, or edited out.

It’s at these moments when we have to decide and make things singular that we execute the very essence of human creativity – choice.

To maintain our humanity in the face of ‘perfecting technology’ we must see that our individual finite ability – that undoubtedly leads to imperfections – is not an error to be smoothed out later, but is in fact an honest and beautiful expression of life. Something which we should seek to preserve.

To maintain being human then means to accept mistakes and irregularities at our attempts at greatness as the hallmarks of our uniqueness. Something to be celebrated, not hidden.

No two artists paint in the same way. This is by design.